Title page for ETD etd-10182000-20380016

Active Flow Control For Reduction of Unsteady Stator-Rotor Interaction In a Turbofan Simulator

Degree

PhD

Department

Mechanical Engineering

Advisory Committee

Advisor Name

Title

Burdisso, Ricardo A.

Committee Chair

Ng, Fai

Committee Member

Rappaport, Theodore S.

Committee Member

Robertshaw, Harry H.

Committee Member

Wicks, Alfred L.

Committee Member

Keywords

Active Flow Control

Aeroacoustics

Trailing Edge Blowing

High Cycle Fatigue

Date of Defense

2000-10-10

Availability

unrestricted

Abstract

The research effort presented in this dissertation consists of employing active trailing edge blowing control to reduce the unsteady stator-rotor interaction in a turbofan simulator.

Two active flow control systems with different wake sensing approaches are successfully implemented on the engine simulator.

The first flow control system utilizes Pitot probes as flow sensors. Use of Pitot probes as sensors is appropriate as a first step toward a more in depth investigation of active trailing edge blowing control. An upper performance limit in terms of wake-filling can be obtained and serves as the baseline in evaluating other control systems with indirect wake sensors. The ability of the system to achieve effective wake filling when subjected to a change in inlet flow conditions demonstrates the feasibility and advantage of active flow control. Significant tonal noise reductions in the far field are also obtained.

The second control system involves using microphones as indirect wake sensors. The significance of these acoustic sensing approaches is to provide a practical TEB approach for realistic engines implementations. Microphones are flush mounted on the inlet case to sense the tonal noise at the blade passing frequency. The first sensing approach only uses the tone magnitude while the second novel sensing approach utilizes both the tone magnitude and phase as error information. The convergence rate of the second sensing approach is comparable with that of the Pitot-probe based experiments. The acoustic results obtained from both sensing approaches agree well with those obtained using Pitot probes as sensors.

In addition to the experimental part of this research, analytical studies are also conducted on the trailing edge blowing modeling using an aeroacoustic code. An analytical model for trailing edge blowing is first proposed. This model is then introduced into the two-dimensional aeroacoustic code to investigate effect of various trailing edge blowing managements in the tonal sound generation.